Mike’s Dad, Alan, is waiting at LaGuardia arrivals a few days later as Mike exits - its a low key reunion. Just smiles, hugs - his Dad takes his suitcase and they walk through the concourse.

They drive on a bright hot day in July in his dad’s station wagon and Alan tries to get the air-conditioning working as they pick up speed on the BQE. His Dad begins to look over at this only son - as if to say he can’t quite believe he’s home and safe.

He smiles, "You’re barely sweating...."

Mike laughs, "It’s the tropics, Dad. Once you get acclimatized, dry heat is nothing. Its been 4 years."

"Yep cant quite believe it - you were just a kid when you left," says Alan

They enter Alan’s small apartment and Mike drops his bags into a room and flops onto the bed - around him are some packing boxes stuffed with his old books, high school pennants and a few trophies. Alan fixes them a snack in kitchen and calls out to him.

"Sorry I haven’t unpacked you - I thought you would want to do it in any case, you know, set it up the way you want....it will be nice when you come back to stay on breaks." Mike winced at the tinge of regret in Alan’s voice.

"You don’t miss the old house - this isn’t too small?" Mike says after a short pause, now at full stretch.

"Your Mom was the gardener, not me, so this suits just fine. Plus I needed to get out..."

"Have you talked to anyone? I mean after I left....."

Alan doesn’t answer but proceeds to set food down on the table - just simple sandwiches and two beers. Mike emerges from his room, takes a long draft from the bottle and stands as he takes in the room for the first time - family familiar objects and mementos now rearranged in a new setting. He looks at the portrait of his mum, Dawn, on the mantle - looking happy and bright in a black and white photo from a decade earlier, sitting on a car hood outside their old house on a sunny winter’s day. The day they moved in when Mike was just 13. Just a few years before the events that would mark them all forever.

"Where’s your medal, Dad?"

"There’s storage downstairs....smaller place so no room for some stuff."

"You know in the army these days, they give you counsellors to talk to when stuff happens. Its all a lot more open these days," Mike says, still looking at the photo.

"I think it would just make it worse, Mike, I really do," Alan says after a pause.

Mike drops it.

Early the next day Mike opens the storage room in the apartment block’s basement, flicks on a light and starts to go through a few dusty boxes, not exactly sure of what he’s looking for. Eventually he finds something.

Mike carefully opens a scrap book of drawings from his teenage years - the opening pages are his sixteen year old self’s sketches of super heroes and characters gleaned from TV westerns but as he carefully turns the pages, he reveals well-thumbed news clippings of a mid-air collision in 1960 where the crippled fuselage of a DC-8 had landed in the middle of a Brooklyn neighborhood, the other passenger plane, a Constellation, spiralled into a field on Staten Island. Dead were everyone on board both aircraft and those unlucky to be at home in a Park Slope apartment block late on a weekday morning - mothers and young children. Alan has suffered some type of breakdown at a time before they even had a name for PTSD. Maybe his Mom’s depression was already there but that one event which unfolded just a mile or so from their home, his Dad’s early retirement from the department, the drinking, the fighting and withdrawal which followed and his Dad’s inability to move beyond it, had tipped her over the edge.

Mike’s leaving for the army was perhaps his own way out, his own way to cope. Leaving her alone with a broken man, to go fight in a war, was perhaps the final nail for his Mom, he reflected. So the last 4 years were a mistake - but fuck it: you can’t go back, Mike thought.

Mike, his face just a little harder, shoves the scrapbook back into place and locks up the unit.

Next Chapter: Chapter 4 - Mike the Freshman